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Social Brain Perspectives on the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience of Human Language
Version 1
: Received: 19 January 2024 / Approved: 19 January 2024 / Online: 23 January 2024 (07:26:20 CET)
A peer-reviewed article of this Preprint also exists.
Oesch, N. Social Brain Perspectives on the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience of Human Language. Brain Sci. 2024, 14, 166. Oesch, N. Social Brain Perspectives on the Social and Evolutionary Neuroscience of Human Language. Brain Sci. 2024, 14, 166.
Abstract
Human language and social cognition are two key disciplines that have traditionally been studied as separate domains. However, emerging research from detailed studies of comparative animal behavior, human social behavior, language acquisition in children, social cognitive neuroscience, and the cognitive neuroscience of language suggest that language and social cognition are two deeply interrelated capacities of the human species. For instance, recent developmental studies on the acquisition of language in infants and young children, draw attention to the important crucial benefits associated with several different aspects of social stimulation for youngsters, including the quantity and quality of linguistic input, dyadic infant/child-to-parent verbal and non-verbal social interactions, and other important social cues integral for facilitating language learning and social bonding. Studies of the adult human brain further suggest a high degree of specialization for sociolinguistic information processing, memory retrieval, and comprehension, suggesting the function of these regions may link language with social cognition and social bonding. In effect, the social brain and social complexity hypotheses may jointly help to explain how neurotypical children and adults learn language, why autistic adults and children exhibit simultaneous deficits in language and social cognition, and why nonhuman primates and other animals with significant computational abilities do not acquire the capacity for language. But perhaps most critically, the following article argues that this and related research will allow scientists to generate a holistic profile and deeper understanding of the healthy adult social brain, while developing more innovative and effective diagnoses, prognoses, and treatments for maladies and deficits also associated with the social brain.
Keywords
social brain; language brain; social brain hypothesis; social complexity hypothesis for animal communication; social bonding; social cognitive neuroscience; language acquisition
Subject
Social Sciences, Language and Linguistics
Copyright: This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
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